I figured I would post about this just as a reminder to folks out there...
Three Georgia Tech friends and I went to Ellison's this past Saturday (10/20) to go down Fantastic and explore down bottom. Trip was pretty uneventful, although we barely missed making it to the North Pole.
On the way back out, I was first down the Nusience Drop and headed over to Warm-up Pit to get on rope while the others were coming behind me. When I got to the rope I noticed that it had obviously been tampered with. We had rigged the 125' drop with a 180' rope from the two bolts located on the lip in the ceiling. The rope was hanging with the end entangled about 40' up from the bottom forming a loop that was hanging down. Luckily this loop reached to just above head height when standing on the large rock at the bottom of the pit.
I had a plan to tug the rope to make sure it was secure then clip in and climb up on the side that I thought was the "good" side. While doing so, I would run my quick-attach safety up the other side to prevent me from cratering on the bottom incase the snarled rope came lose while I climbed to untangle the mess . I would have effectively ensured I would not fall if the snarl came loose. Luckily I tugged on both ends of the rope for a couple seconds and everything came loose and fell to the bottom. Two of us grabbed the end of the rope, clipped on and tugged like hell to make sure the rigging was as good as could be. I clipped in and climbed out quite nervously.
We were lucky on two accounts: first, that we could actually reach the rope and secondly that it fell free from being tangled. We could have easily been trapped in the cave for a while. We had a call out, but it wasn't needed.
This leads me to what I wanted to mention/warn folks about. Don't screw around with someone else's rope.
Its not too often we run into other people in the same cave that we are in, but there are usually ways around having to mess with someone else's rigging. I think a group came in to bounce warm-up and pulled up our rope to get it out of the way for their rope, and possibly used our rig point, and just tossed it back down the pit when they were done. I would have much rather them just use our rope (which I know is questionable for some) than being careless and just tossing our rope back in. In the past I have tied the first rope in a cave down to something solid to make sure it can't be pulled up, but didn't do it this time. I will in the future.
-Chris Goodman